altruism

New & Noteworthy

First off (in case you missed it) we are happy to share that Clippings is back – thanks to TSP board member Mallory Harrington! TSP will bring you weekly updates of sociology and sociologists in the news. This week we have Janet Vertesi in The Conversation on NASA and AI-human teams, Matthew Desmond in the ACLU’s podcast At Liberty on poverty, Juliet Schor in NPR’s TED Radio Hour on the four-day workweek, Neil Gross in Time on police reform, and Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve in WHYY on a police officer charged with over 200 sex crimes.

“Your Tweets, pictures, and messages may be used against you.” Also from Mallory Harrington’s desk, we have a new Discovery on Social Media in Criminal Trials from work by Jeffrey LaneFanny A. Ramirez, and Desmond U. Patton. In this piece, we cover how public defenders face many challenges in defending their clients on the social media front.

From the Archives

The current national blood shortage is leaving vulnerable people at risk. Blood donations, sociologists have found, are largely motivated by altruism, empathy, and internal-personal motivations. Click here to read TSP’s “There’s Research on That” on blood donation by Jillian LaBranche.

Sexual assault rates are typically high during the beginning of the school year and this time (August-November) is known as the “Red Zone”. Reporting these sexual charges is usually left to victims, but the act of reporting a sexual assault can subject victims to risks. Read our Discovery Counting the Cost of Reporting Sexual Assault by Amber Joy Powell on work in Sociological Science.

More from our Partners & Community Pages

Contexts has two new pieces for you to read:

Council on Contemporary Families published:

Circus Tent by Thomas Totz via flickr.com
Circus Tent by Thomas Totz via flickr.com

This past weekend I came across a piece by Pulitzer Prize winner Gareth Cook in the Boston Globe about new research showing that spending time helping others can actually make it seem like we’ve got more time for ourselves. It sounded like a great, eminently sociological project in so many ways: its emphasis on the social meaning and variable experience of time, the importance of selflessness and interacting with others, the use of interviews and experiments, and, of course, the classic, counter-intuitive conclusion that the best solution for not feeling like you have enough time is to make time for others.

My first thought was to throw it over to our Citings & Sightings team as another cool case of how sociological research finds its way to public attention in and through the mass media. But a closer look made me pause. It turns out the research was produced by a team headed up by a professor in a business school (Harvard, no less).  Scholars who teach future MBAs to make millions taking on questions of selflessness and the social experience of time? Suddenly I found myself getting cynical about the researcher’s claim that such activities give us confidence we can get things done and allows us to feel more in control of our own lives.

Lately, whether it is management professors, researchers in public health, or cultural studies critics, scholars all over the academy seem to be taking on topics and using methods and theories pioneered by sociologists. It is easy to be a bit skeptical or defensive, but rather than getting caught up in turf wars, I think it better to celebrate such insights and accomplishments as part of the structure and functioning of social life, claiming them as part of the big, broad sociological tent. It’s not important who is researching sociological questions, but that scholars of all stripes are calling attention to the importance and complexity of social life and interactions—a broad context that’s so often missing from the individualist, economistic, and biological visions of human beings and social life that are otherwise dominant in our academic culture.

Soldiers and citizens work together to fight flooding in North Dakota. Photo by Master Sgt. David Lipp.
Soldiers and citizens work together to fight flooding in North Dakota. Photo by Master Sgt. David Lipp.

Last spring a fascinating little story in the LA Times on the collective/behaviorial intelligence of fire ants put me in mind of the Harvard sociobiologist E.O. Wilson (“Fire Ants for Sociology”). I first heard about Wilson in high school (his paradigm-shifting book came out in 1979; I graduated in 1985), read some of his work in college, and talked about it a fair bit hanging out with biologists in graduate school, but I hadn’t thought a lot about him and his ideas since.

Wilson, I learned from a recent New Yorker piece on the genetics of altruism, hasn’t been hiding or anything. Though now over 80 years old, Wilson is still as busy as the ants (too bad, for alliterative purposes, it wasn’t bees) he’s spent his life studying. Indeed, among his numerous accomplishments of last 20 years is a massive, richly (and apparently hand-) illustrated, 800-page book on Pheidole, the “most abundant genus of ants.”

The article in the New Yorker is actually not about Wilson, though, so much as a whole debate that has taken shape within his field. It centers on natural selection and the existence of altruism and cooperation. More specifically, it is about the validity of William Hamilton’s “inclusive fitness theory,” which posited that the Darwinian concept of competitive fitness was driven not only by how many offspring an individual manages to have, but also about the reproductive capabilities of surviving relatives. At the core of the controversy is the validity and utility of the elegant mathematical formula from and upon which Hamilton derived his theory in the 1960s.

For several decades now, the equation—which which I won’t detail here—has held essentially biblical status for explaining genes and cooperation. According to the story, Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins called Hamilton “the most distinguished Darwinian since Darwin.” But a new generation of biologists are challenging the formula on mathematical grounds; they have joined forces with Wilson, whose own doubts stem from his voluminous knowledge and observations of insects. Wilson now says his embrace of Hamilton’s math was misguided: “I’m going to be blunt,” he told the New Yorker. “The equation doesn’t work. It’s a phantom measure.”

This article is a model of science reporting (and sociology of science type insight), with fascinating details about how an idea emerges and takes hold of a field, the relationship between mathematical modeling and empirical observation in the biological sciences, and the social nature of the development of scientific knowledge. The latter isn’t always pretty: the insurgents have weathered a storm of both public and private virulent criticism. It is, as reporter Jonah Lehrer nicely characterizes it, “science with existential stakes.”

Still, for my money, the Wilson parts of the story are the most compelling. Wilson, after all, is the one who helped make Hamilton’s equation famous; now he’s leading the charge against the theorem, and he seems to relish the attention and controversy. Perhaps I’m a sucker for the drama and intrigue of the renegade scholar. But at a more intellectual level, what I find appealing is Wilson’s insistence that “human generosity might have evolved as an emergent property not of the individual but of the group.”

“Group selection” is apparently dismissed by most evolutionary biologists, but Wilson believes it holds the key to understanding altruism. “Goodness,” as the article explains, “might actually be an adaptive trait, allowing more cooperative groups to outcompete their conniving cousins.” Wilson cites cases of cooperation the animal kingdom ranging from microbes to plants and female lions. “In all of these studies, many of which have been conducted in the controlled conditions of the lab, clumps of cooperators thrive and replicate, while selfish groups wither and die.”

Lehrer goes on to quote a wonderful, concise bit from a 2007 Wilson paper: “Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary.”

I love those first two sentences. But as profound and compelling as I find them, the third gives me pause, reminding me of the difference between the straight biological sciences and the human sciences. My sense is that in the human domain it is precisely the tension between selfishness and altruism and the choices we make between ourselves and our collective commitments—Wilson’s “commentary”—that is most interesting and uncertain (not just theoretically, but in actual social life).

In my earlier post on Wilson and his ants, I wrote that a group or collective can develop complex systems to achieve things that no individual member could have imagined or enacted. In addition, I suggested humans have a unique ability and capacity to organize, structure, and reflect upon our collective activities. Indeed, in my view, self-conscious reflection is one of humans’ real sources of power and adaptability in the natural world. As both individuals and groups, we are constantly faced with choices about if and when to be self-interested or altruist, individualistic or cooperative. These are not easily summarized by mathematical equations. Nor, for that matter, are they fully structured and determined—which is why, as biological as we are and as much as the social sciences share with the hard sciences, important differences remain regarding what the significant questions are, how we act upon them, and what is only just commentary.